I think the new behavior is great. First of all because it remembers both where I'm saving and where I've been exporting in my workflow, and second because frankly saving in GIMP's native format and creating a flat lossy JPEG that approximates the work you've been doing are really fucking different things, and I find it comforting that they choose to make that explicit. I can how if you open GIMP once a month to make a LOLCAT how this behavior could be annoying.